Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

My purpose is to write a history of the civil rights movement out of the conviction from which it was made, namely that truth requires a maximum effort to see through the eyes of strangers, foreigners, and enemies.

Religious oratory became the only safe marketable skill, and a reputation for oratory substituted for diplomas and all other credentials.

For most of the next century, a man with a burning desire to be a saint might well find himself competing with another preacher intent only on making a fortune, as all roads converged at the Negro church. It served not only as a place of worship but also as a bulletin board to a people who owned no organs of communication, a credit union to those without banks, and even a kind of people’s court.

So Vernon Johns finished his youth as the stepson of his uncle, and grandson of a slave who killed his master and of a master who killed for his slave. Only in the Bible did he find open discussion of such a tangle of sex, family, slavery, and violence.

Johns sat down and wrote out a sermon of his own, “Transfigured Moments,” which in 1926 became the first work by a Negro published in Best Sermons. This analysis of the symbolism of mountains in the lives of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus Christ would be studied by Negro theology students for the next generation. “It is good to be the possessor of some mountain-top experience,” wrote Johns, in a long passage on the need to tie the inspiration of leaders to the experience of the common people.

From the pulpit, he would append to a tour de force sermon some remarks on his bargain prices and the quality of the produce in the basement.

Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan was published in 1905, and ten years later became The Birth of a Nation, the feature film whose stunning success established Hollywood and motion pictures as fixtures of American culture.

No one but young King and a few of his Morehouse friends knew that his first pulpit oration had been borrowed from “Life Is What You Make It,” a published sermon by Harry Emerson Fosdick of the Riverside Church in New York.

What Niebuhr did was to invent his own distinction between the character of people acting in large social groups as opposed to their character as individual people.

Society, Niebuhr argued, responded substantively only to power, which meant that all the forces of piety, education, charity, reform, and evangelism could never hope to eliminate injustice without dirtying themselves in power conflicts.

This means that non-violence is a particularly strategic instrument for an oppressed group which is hopelessly in the minority and has no possibility of developing sufficient power to set against its oppressors.”

“Justice is never discontinuously related to love. Justice is a negative application of love…. Justice is a check (by force, if necessary) upon ambitions of individuals seeking to overcome their own insecurity at the expense of others. Justice is love’s message for the collective mind.”

In a paper obviously influenced by Hegel and Niebuhr, King wrote that “if a position implies a negation, and a negation a position, then faith carries disbelief with it, theism, atheism, and if one member of the pair comes to be doubted the result may be disastrous to religion itself.”

He had long since invented a coded rating system for eligible women, calling an attractive woman a “doctor” and a stunning one a “constitution,” saying that she was “well-established and amply endowed.”

Restless, King decided to step up his activity in the local chapter of the NAACP. He gave a stirring speech at one of its small gatherings and then accepted a position on the executive committee. His letter of appointment came from Rosa Parks, secretary of the chapter.

In most respects, the Graetz family lived as though they were Negroes, but their white skin produced some unprecedented legal contortions. Because they always chose to sit in the upstairs Negro section of movie theaters, for instance, theater owners worried that to sell them tickets might bring down Alabama’s legal sanctions against establishments that “sponsored” interracial public meetings. (Those same laws made it technically illegal for Graetz to preach in his own church.) The theater owners’ solution was to let them in free.

Another preacher told the crowd of his effort to give a ride to an ancient woman known to almost everyone as Mother Pollard. She had refused all his polite suggestions that she drop out of the boycott on account of her age, the preacher announced. He inspired the crowd with a spontaneous remark of Mother Pollard’s, which became a classic refrain of the movement: “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”

For King, the moment awakened and confirmed his belief that the essence of religion was not a grand metaphysical idea but something personal, grounded in experience—something that opened up mysteriously beyond the predicaments of human beings in their frailest and noblest moments.

“Don’t get panicky. Don’t do anything panicky. Don’t get your weapons. If you have weapons, take them home. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember that is what Jesus said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love.”

Soon the deputies out on the dragnet were coming up empty because so many of the Negroes were on their way downtown voluntarily. Laughter began to spread through the crowd. A joke went around that some inquiring Negroes were upset upon being told by phone that they were not on the arrest list. Some of the white deputies, infected by the good humor, began to enjoy themselves too. Sheriff Butler, exasperated by this perversion of the penal spirit, came outside to shout, “This is no vaudeville show!” But he had little effect.

Republican strategists looked forward to a major realignment of American politics, in which fiscal conservatives, educated suburbanites, and Negroes would combine to form an enlightened majority.

“A law may not make a man love me,” said King, “but it can stop him from lynching me.”

Forty years in a segregated Army conditioned Eisenhower to think of Negroes as inherently subordinate. His condescension was so natural and paternal as to seem nearly well-meaning. Only his private secretary winced with embarrassment when he passed along the latest “nigger jokes” from his friends at the Bobby Jones golf course in Augusta.

“When I stood there in Westminster Abbey, with all of its beauty, I thought about all of the beautiful hymns and anthems that the people would go into there to sing, yet the Church of England never took a stand against this system. The Church of England sanctioned it. The Church of England gave it a moral stature. And all of the exploitation perpetuated by the British Empire was sanctioned by the Church of England. Something else came to my mind. God comes into the picture even when the Church won’t take a stand. God…has said that all men must reflect the dignity and worth of all human personality…. Seems this morning that I can hear God speaking.”

“I would say that Nixon has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere. When you are close to Nixon he almost disarms you with his apparent sincerity…. And so I would conclude by saying that if Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.”

A preacher and part-time college professor wondered why King had not responded to his two previous letters, both of which concerned his application on May 11 to become the first Negro to enroll at the University of Mississippi. This last matter became urgent when Mississippi authorities committed the professor to the state mental institution on the explicit ground that only an insane Negro would seek admission to Ole Miss.

King embraced the students for taking the step he had been toying with for the past three years—of seeking out a nonviolent confrontation with the segregation laws.

King was the first citizen in the history of Alabama to be prosecuted for felony tax evasion, the technical charge being that he had perjured himself in signing his tax returns for 1956 and 1958. Governor John Patterson, who as attorney general had led the fight against the bus boycott and the state NAACP, did nothing to contradict speculation that Alabama was stretching state power to its limits in order to make a political example of King. While signing the papers requesting King’s extradition from Georgia, Patterson made a merrily sarcastic public statement. “If you dance,” he quipped, “you must pay the fiddler.”

Walker asked the librarian to give him the first volume of Douglas Southall Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee. Johns, who admired some of Lee’s qualities while despising his cause, often had cited Freeman’s book to Walker in his Civil War discourses, and it tickled Walker to think that white Southerners would arrest him for trying to read about their most cherished hero.

During the Atlanta student march, white pedestrians stood silently for the most part, gawking at the endless procession. A bewildered woman matter-of-factly said, “I didn’t know there were that many niggers in college.”

Early the next day, Senator Kennedy decided to pay a surprise call on Lyndon Johnson to offer the nomination, which was not expected, so that he could take credit for having done so when Johnson refused. Kennedy did not quite offer the job; he merely took the idea a few inches outside his pocket and flashed it in front of Johnson, as he put it. Moments later, a breathless Kennedy took his brother aside in another hotel room. “You just won’t believe it,” cried John Kennedy. “What?” said Robert. “He wants it,” said the nominee, in utter disbelief. “Oh, my God!” said Robert. “Now what do we do?”

Malcolm X was gaining a reputation in the white media as an incendiary anti-white orator at the same time that his debating skills were bringing him lecture dates in prestigious theology schools, such as King’s own alma mater in Boston. Rather oddly, he addressed his letter to King at the NAACP office in New York, and King instructed his secretary to decline the invitation with a polite letter beginning “Dear Mr. X.”

On Martin’s advice, they built Dawson a specially partitioned private office, nicknamed “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and left him alone except for ceremonial occasions.

The paradoxes of race made it possible for controlled racial conflict between the South and the national party to benefit both sides. At the Democratic Convention of 1940, the national Democrats helped gain Franklin Roosevelt’s first heavy Negro vote simply by inviting a Negro minister to deliver a prayer. During this invocation, Senator “Cotton Ed” Smith stalked out of the convention to a hero’s welcome at home in South Carolina, where he delighted crowds with lightheartedly hateful speeches denouncing the Northerners for inviting a “thick-lipped, blue-gummed, nappy-headed Senegambian” to pray before the party of John C. Calhoun. Now, twenty years later, national Democrats could hope that two Kennedy phone calls about the King case might deliver the Negro vote in the North. At the same time, governors Vandiver and Patterson, by acting resolutely on the anti-Negro side, not only enhanced their own political popularity but also, paradoxically, helped convince white Southerners that it was still safe to vote the traditional Democratic ticket for President.

the most startling component of Kennedy’s victory was his 40 percent margin among Negro voters. In 1956, Negroes had voted Republican by roughly 60-40; in 1960, they voted Democratic by roughly 70—30. This 30 percent shift accounted for more votes than Kennedy’s victory margins in a number of key states, including Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and the Carolinas.

“We believe it is an affirmatively good thing to preserve the predominantly racial characteristics that have contributed to Western civilization over the past two thousand years,” Kilpatrick told the NBC audience, “and we do not believe that the way to preserve them lies in fostering any intimate race mixing by which these principles and characteristics inevitably must be destroyed.”

“You know there’s very apt to be violence, serious violence, tonight if there’s another demonstration,” he said sharply to Lewis. “And I can only conclude that it’s just a matter of pride with you. And bullheadedness. You’re refusing to agree with us because of your own pride and your own sin.” The room went silent under the sting of Campbell’s rebuke. Lewis smiled warmly at Campbell, as though taking pity on him. “Okay, I’m a sinner,” he replied softly. “We’re gonna march.”

On the second day they passed through Farmville in Prince Edward County—home of the Vernon Johns family and the Virginia portion of the Brown case. To avoid compliance with the integration ruling, the county government had transferred most of its school property to hastily organized private schools for white children. Nearly all the Negro children had gone without schooling for two years.

One of the men grabbed Zwerg’s suitcase and smashed him in the face with it. Others slugged him to the ground, and when he was dazed beyond resistance, one man pinned Zwerg’s head between his knees so that the others could take turns hitting him. As they steadily knocked out his teeth, and his face and chest were streaming with blood, a few adults on the perimeter put their children on their shoulders to view the carnage.

In miniature, the Freedom Riders were compressing into one summer the psychology of the first three centuries of Christianity under the Roman Empire. Perpetually on the brink of schism, apostles of nonviolent love were fanning out into the provinces to fill jails, while their confederates were negotiating with the emperors themselves for full citizenship rights, hoping to establish their outlandish new faith as the official doctrine of the state.

In what became a pattern of the civil rights movement, two Eisenhower judges agreed with the Justice Department against one of the Administration’s own Democratic judges.

Allen related such details about himself openly, and was equally frank with Moses about what he had seen at the cotton gin. Lee didn’t have a tire iron or anything else, he said. Lee had told Hurst that he wouldn’t talk to him as long as Hurst had a gun out, and Lee had jumped out of his truck near where Allen had been standing. Hurst then had run around the truck and shouted, “I’m not playing with you this morning!” Then he shot Lee in the head from a few feet away. Allen had testified about the tire iron because that’s what he was told to say, and he went along to protect his own life and his family. But he hated to lie about Lee, whom he knew to be an upstanding Negro farmer in the county. Allen told Moses what he had told his wife: “I didn’t want to tell no story about the dead, because you can’t ask the dead for forgiveness.”

As they passed by a framed copy of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on a mantel, King said, “Mr. President, I’d like to see you stand in this room and sign a Second Emancipation Proclamation outlawing segregation, one hundred years after Lincoln’s. You could base it on the Fourteenth Amendment.” Kennedy responded positively enough to ask King to prepare a draft proclamation for him to consider. King said he would be happy to submit one.

my involvement in the struggle for the rights of my people must always keep me above the level of littleness.”

Hoover substantiated this ringing alarm by disclosing confidentially to the congressmen, and to selected senators as well, that a New York lawyer named Stanley Levison was both a secret member of the Communist Party, subject to orders from the Kremlin, and a guiding adviser to Martin Luther King. The message was clear: that the troublesome Negro revolution was Moscow’s skirmish line, and that only the omniscient Hoover knew the full details.

The ramifications of this one Las Vegas arrest could spell disaster for the Administration. It meant that the CIA and the Kennedy brothers had poisoned the U.S. government’s chances of prosecuting Giancana and associated gangsters for any of their crimes. They had exposed the U.S. government to disgrace as one that pursued murder in partnership with gangsters, and exposed the President to blackmail as a consort of gangster women.

“Many Southern leaders are pathetically trapped by their own devices. They…know that the perpetuation of this archaic, dying order is hindering the rapid growth of the South. Yet they cannot speak this truth—they are imprisoned by their own lies. It is history’s wry paradox that when Negroes win their struggle to be free, those who have held them down will themselves be freed for the first time.”

Georgia Republicans despaired of finding another sacrificial candidate, as their party remained something of a political joke in many Southern states.

Never forget that everything that Hitler did in Germany was legal.

“No, we are not willing to wait any longer,” King cried. “We want freedom now!”